brands: for an alternative future

Product naming is a black art - "art" because there is no reliable way to create a guaranteed outcome, and "black" because it scares me.

There are plenty of people who will tell you how important a good name is - Igor tells us:

Great names are a powerful force in the branding, marketing and advertising campaigns of the companies they work for. They differentiate you from competitors, make an emotional connection with your audience, and help to build a brand that ignites the passions of your customers.

Aaaaah! Too much pressure!

So to take some of the angst out of my current naming woes, I gave myself the following challenge: imagine some computer brands for an alternative future. Branding for "someday" freed me from worrying about "what is" and woke up my ability to imagine "what could be".

The only other requirement was that each of the names should "belong" to the class of solution in some obvious way.

For your enjoyment, here's what I came up with. I see some good stories in there.

CORES - vast, sprawling, baroque, maintained by cadres of specialists, expensive, powerful

• Boberg Ironwerks
• Pandaemonia
• Perch/Prism
• DagMat GMBH

CLONE - commodites, high-velocity consumer stuff, cheap

• TinkerTek
• GNDM
• CMD (Chiba Mechanical Designs, jokingly referred to as "Chotto Matte Dozo")
• ACKme Labs

LEGACY - yesterday's iron slung together with patches and gum, less expensive than CORES

• @ICO Salvage
• Blinckenlicht

IMPLANTS (a.k.a. "IMPS") - human/machine interfaces, commodity, blue-collar

• Augmento
• Xenocraft

EDGE - experimental, dangerous, proscribed, fashionable, undocumented

• Aleph
• Susurrus
• Gedanken
• Koji Boomwerks

NANO - very dangerous, military, Turing test, associated with robotics research

• Spore
• PhageX
• dMinimus
• Reductam AI ("ad infinitum")